Round Trip Distance: 2 miles
Difficulty: Easy
Elevation: 497 - 679 feet
Cellphone: 0-3 bars
Time: 2 hrs. 30 mins.
Trailhead: 33.01289, -113.17509
Fee: none
Attractions: petroglyphs
Hummingbird Point is a petroglyph site that is located along the Gila River west of Gila Bend, Arizona. Found at the site are hundreds of petroglyphs that were made upon basalt boulders. Route finding is pretty easy once you find the road that leads to the site.
To get there from Gila Bend head west on I-8 for 12.8 miles and take Exit 102 for the Painted Rock Road. Follow the Painted Rock Road for about 10 miles and then continue straight onto the Rocky Point Road. At this point the Painted Rock Petroglyph Site and Campground will be down a short side road on the left. After another 4.7 miles the Rocky Point Road crosses the dry bed of the Gila River and in another 3.3 miles it comes to the road in this photo that departs on the left. Parking at this point will give you a round trip distance to the petroglyphs of about 4.2 miles. The 4WD road is bumpy in places as it bounces over countless embed rocks. We drove the first 1.1 miles of it before parking at a particularly rough spot and hiked the last mile. For turn-by-turn directions to the turn off onto the 4WD road enter 33.01289, -113.17509 into your driving app.
The 4WD road leads all the way to the petroglyphs but when it reaches the point where it drops off of the mesa to the valley of the Gila River it becomes an extreme 4WD road so even if you continue driving to that spot you will still have to hike the last quarter mile or so.
When you arrive at the site after hiking around the base of the hill you will be greeted by a brown mylar marker with a Site Etiquette sticker reminding you to help protect the petroglyphs and a second sticker that mentions the law that is meant to encourage doing so.
The petroglyphs are found on boulders of all sizes beginning at the bottom of the hill and extending quite high up. From the brown mylar marker the petroglyphs continue upstream for over 300 feet.
The eponymous Hummingbird is on top of a large boulder about half way up the slope.
The image might be easier to photograph on a cloudy day. Even with a zoom lens it is difficult getting a good angle.
It would be an easy job to break your neck trying to crawl over all the boulders to take closeup photos of many of the petroglyphs.
Here is a big boulder with a large number of images that is down near the bottom of the hill.
Notice the image with the bow and arrow in this hunting scene.
As hot as the surface of these boulders get on a sunny day makes you wonder whether the images were made in the winter time or on a cloudy day. We were here in the month of February and the temperature was in the 80's.
Another higher up boulder.
Hard to get to boulder.
We only showed a few of the hundreds of photos that we took at Hummingbird Point but they should be enough to give a general idea of what to expect. If you would like to see them for yourself all you have to do is 'Take a hike'.
